This Town Needs Guns: Animals (blue & green galaxy vinyl) [SARGENT HOUSE]

Why you'll love it

This Sargent House pressing comes on blue & green galaxy vinyl with a download card. Animals is intricate, big-hearted British math rock, with "Panda" and "Chinchilla" at its heart.

This edition

• Blue & green galaxy vinyl
• Download card included
• Pressed in the Czech Republic

About the album

Every song on Animals is named after an animal, and the reason is wonderfully unglamorous. The band gave the tracks placeholder names while writing so nobody had to call them "New Track 1," then never agreed on anything better, so "Chinchilla," "Baboon" and "Zebra" they stayed. Stuart Smith's high, earnest vocals ride over guitar parts that sound like two people tapping out Morse code at once.

The Oxford band recorded it over a string of weekends at the Lodge Studios in Northampton, with Stuart Smith singing, Tim Collis on guitar, Dan Adams on bass and trumpet and Chris Collis on drums. "Panda" got the video, "Chinchilla" and "Badger" show off the finger-tapped guitar tangles, "Gibbon" and "Rabbit" stretch out, and the tiny "Quetzal" is over in 35 seconds. BSM Records issued it in the UK in October 2008, and Sargent House brought it to North America in 2009.

For its tenth anniversary the band, now TTNG, toured the whole album with Smith back on vocals and cut an acoustic remake. A zoo in 13 songs, and considerably easier to keep on a shelf.

Also at Kops: more This Town Needs Guns on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On Sargent House (cat# SH082), a reissue of the 2008 album.